Ovid Pierce: Plantation Provides Novelist Atmosphere
This page contains excerpts of an article printed in The Daily Reflector regarding East Carolina's resident novelst, Ovid Pierce, and his novel, On a Lonesome Porch. This and other articles may be found in the records of the Chancellor's Office in the University Archives.
Citation for this particular article is: "Plantation Provides Novelist Atmosphere" The Daily Reflector. April 30, 1960.
The house stood within the cluster of oaks as if it had evolved within them . . . a product of nature and not of man.
There was something about the place that was different. It was the air, or the grass, or the fields, or it was everything combined.
A white fence ran up the hill in back of the house, enclosing the animals . . . there were white ducks, a white-faced cow, and once in a while you could see a mallard drake with his brilliant colored plumage skimming across the pond in jaunts of three or four feet at a time.
The front lawn stretched carpet-like down in front of the house and was rippled by a breeze blowing from the road. The grass was brown now . . . from the stiffening effects of winter’s frost and chilling winds.Summer would come soon, and the grass would be green again.
Under the big tree, the shadows created by the sun on their limbs cast their darkness in splotches over the ground. The acorns crunched underfoot.
Time here was meaningless.Nothing existed but this one place . . . its people and its buildings. Everything seemed to have life . . . to speak, yet not to speak.
Everything told a story . . . not by the words, but by appearance.There was no grandeur, no white columns, nothing lavish . . . just people, buildings, grass, trees, stirring breeze, and shadows . . .
Ovid Pierce’s 350-acre plantation has been the atmosphere from which he has drawn the heart of his two novels, The Plantation, and his latest, On a Lonesome Porch. After a week of teaching at East Carolina College he spends his weekends on the Plantation writing and looking after the farm.
He is as successful a farmer as he is a teacher or a writer, and can as readily discuss crop rotation and methods as he can Faulkner’s symbolism or Wolfe’s biographical implications.The quality of his harvests demonstrates a keen farming interest as much as the attitudes of his former students show his devotion to teaching.
Inside the house, Mr. Pierce has created a post-Civil War atmosphere, with rifles hanging on the walls, a set of dueling pistols on the mantle, plus many other relics of bygone days.
This close association with the past has had its effect, and as Mr. Pierce says, “It would be extremely difficult to write of it as it would be of many sections of the South, without interpreting is as the present margin of past time. I tried to make of The Plantation, in part, what my father’s generation meant to me as I looked back at it as a child.”Ovid Pierce first began to write during his college years at Duke, where he was editor of The Archive, an undergraduate literary magazine. Later he had stories published in the Southwest Review and other quarterlies; recently he did an article on North Carolina for Holiday magazine.
However, his career as a North Carolinian has been just as enduring. Just after Pearl Harbor, he entered the army as an intelligence officer, and at the conclusion of the war joined the faculty of Southern Methodist University where he taught for four years.After a time on the faculty of Tulane University he came home to North Carolina, where he is now teaching at East Carolina College. Soon after returning to North Carolina he made this statement, “Though I’ve been away since the war, I still feel that North Carolina is home, at least when I try to write a story, that is where my mind has to go.”Consequently, his writings have been about the land he has known, and Ovid Pierce has conferred a dignity upon the South that few southern writers have recognized.His novels are not concerned with moonlight and magnolias, the fall of any great tradition, nor is he making a plea for a persecuted South. Usually he presents the picture of a changing time, and a people adjusting to a new way of life.The kindness and understanding with which he treats the Negroes as well as the Whites could come only from a man who has known and felt the true southern traditions.
His latest novel is a work of art that will appeal to every person who has felt time passing too swiftly by.As one reviewer has written, “On a Lonesome Porch is an enthralling novel. In its imaginative recreation of a day that has gone, the vividness of its descriptions, its insight into character, and its power[ful] yet restrained emotion, the book stands as the work of a master craftsman.”
He does all of his writing in penciled longhand on legal pads and later makes changes and types them.Usually he gets out of bed around 6:00 a.m. and writes until noon, doing most of the work at a small table in the corner of his library or in a lawn chair under one of the Plantation oaks facing the rolling cotton fields.
In the classroom he is informal, propping one leg over the corner of a desk or leaning on the rostrum as he lectures. Many of his students have commented that his classes are more like a personal conversation than a formal lecture. Boredom is a thing unknown in his classes, and when a student demonstrates better than average ability Ovid Pierce is the first to become enthused.He points out the good and poor qualities, never quite criticizing, but still showing how it can be done better.
Thus we see in one man: teacher, author, farmer, and student. Ovid Pierce is a man symbolized by his own smile . . . warm and sincere.
